When I click on PHPMyAdmin I get the "Cannot load mysql extension. Please check PHP configuration"

There is nothing in phpinfo() for 'mysql'.

When I attempted to load Seagull as my MVC framework, it couldn't get by the MySQL credentials part of the installation, suggesting that it couldn't find MySQL. I am also having some problems with my Zend installation, but these could be independent.

It has been some time since I installed XAMPP for Windows XP, but I do recall that I attempted to do a standard install. I could not detail the exact installation steps at this point.

I installed XAMPP 1.5.4a previously on a Linux machine, and I have been able to access PHPMyAdmin on that machine. phpinfo() has MySQL and MySQLi settings. Curiously Status indicates that MySQL (and everything else) is disabled, which is confusing.

I'm having the exact same problem. Everything was working until I installed Zend. That's when the problems started.

I'm doing some checks to see if I can isolate the problem but no luck as of yet. I've changed the php.ini file with the one in the XAMPP Apache file folder and made sure that the php_mysql.dll extension was uncommented. I also checked the extension path by using both the Zend path and the XAMPP path (not at the same time of course) but nothing.

Actually, it's Zend Platform that's the problem. I uninstalled all the Zend products that I had on my system and got back to just XAMPP. At that point, everything worked fine.

The first Zend product that I re-installed was Platform 2.2.3 and the problems came back. I un-installed it again and everything went back to normal.

<edit> I forgot to mention that I followed Marcel's PDF on installing Zend Platform on XAMPP. It doesn't work quite as described, but close enough. I also un-commented the Zend Optimizer line in the PHP.ini file </edit>

I then installed Zend Studio(5.5.0), Optimizer(3.2.0) and Guard(4.0.1) and tested after each install. Everything worked fine.

I placed a ticket to Zend regarding this and the response was that Platform doesn't work with XAMPP 1.5.5 because of PHP 5.2 and that I should downgrade my XAMPP.

I have a better solution. I won't worry about installing Platform until it catches up. I was just testing Platform to see how it worked and if there was any advantage to using it.

I have sites written with PHP 5.2 that I need to be able to maintain and I really don't feel like re-writing them in 5.1 or 4.x just so I can test a piece of software. Unfortunately, I don't have a testing computer to play with this so I was working with a production machine. Maybe this will give me an excuse to buy a test system.